S3-compatible object storage on Cassandra

In an industry where so many people want to change the world, it’s fair to say that low cost object storage has done just that. Building a business that requires flexible low-latency storage is now affordable in a way we couldn’t imagine before.

When building the Exoscale public cloud offering, we knew that a simple object storage service, protected by Swiss privacy laws, would be crucial. After looking at the existing object storage software projects, we decided to build our own solution: Pithos.

Pithos is an open source S3-compatability layer for Apache Cassandra, the column database. In other words, it allows you to use standard S3 tools to store objects in your own Cassandra cluster. If this is the first time that you’ve looked at object storage software then you may wonder why Pithos is built on top of a NoSQL database but it’s not all that unusual.